Chiseled valleys and stiff peaks of ridged muscle were among the many benefits of wood chopping. I imagined my life with him as an imported wife while he, the father of my children, stood on top of the wood chopping medal podium. Then a friend let slip that the Wood Chopper was also sleeping with a short blonde from New Zealand.

I decided to get even.

Tears fell from his big blue eyes and eventually he offered two hundred pounds for the procedure. He said he couldn’t stay with me. His feelings were stronger for the New Zealander and his social life was finally improving. Within hours word had spread, a development I hadn’t anticipated. Jen Smith told me she was on my side and offered support. We walked to the hospital together and then she hugged me and left after I insisted on going on ahead by myself. I lingered in a ward full of old people in wheelchairs and watched her leave through a large window. Afterwards I walked over to St Andrew’s Square and spent some of the money on a silk scarf that was orange.

I saw the Wood Chopper for the last time in the pub a few nights later. He and the New Zealander were arguing. Rumour was they were having difficulties. I never told him what happened to his baby. In fact, he never asked.

Henry fills his mouth with urine and looks across at Jasper. He swirls it slowly around in his cheeks, with a look on his face that conveys the impression that he’s sampling a particularly complex burgundy.

“It’s like pear juice.”

“That’s exactly what it’s like.”

They sit facing each other, nodding agreement. Wind whistles wickedly around the timber cabin, celebrating its triumph over electricity, probing for further weakness.

“Never drank pear juice.”

“Me neither.”

The door rattles on its hinges, and both turn towards the disturbance. Flame hurls shadows into the slipstream of their collective gaze, gifting an almost ethereal quality to their surroundings.

“Just the wind.”

“That’s all.”

Jasper reaches onto the floor, grabs a half-full bottle of beer and takes a hearty swig. He holds the bottle at arms length, subjecting it to intense scrutiny, struggling to focus on the label in the poor light.

“It’s called Bokkøl…not bad either.”

“Does the job”

Henry turns and picks up a log, throwing it onto the fire, sending a galaxy of sparks up through the chimney and into the cold night sky. He stands to reach the iPod station on the mantelpiece, opting for shuffle before slumping backwards into the high-backed armchair, a drunken prince falling onto his throne.

“What’d ya put on?”

“Don’t know.”

The delicate opening strains of Shine on you Crazy Diamond merge with the sounds of nature’s fury, accompanied by the hiss and crackle of fresh log on red-hot embers. Both tilt back heads and close eyes, allowing the soothing sound to shuttle them back through moments played out to this particular soundtrack. Lead guitar licks seductively at their consciousness, providing aural bridges between synapses and neurotransmitters that had lost touch with one another over the years, reintroducing them as long-lost friends.

Jasper is whisked to Goa, to a party in the jungle at Anjuna, lying mangled in the arms of Claire as the sun rises over the mayhem, dispelling the mysteries of the night. He can taste her salty lips, smell the coconut oil on her soft skin, feel the lust, the love, the obsession of a younger man. It’s November ‘96: Another lifetime.

Remember when you were young?

You shone like the sun

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Henry travels back a further ten years, to the West of Ireland, a house party in Furbo. It’s his first trip. They lie listening to Floyd for hours, finally understanding; thrilled by each revelation. They escape the confines of the room for the vast openness of Furbo beach, which sparkles invitingly under a full moon. Twelve run madly in the shallows of the low tide, sucking the salty positive ions deep into their lungs, exhilarated by the re-birth they feel within. Cian, overcome with lust for life, picks up a smooth chunk of granite and hurls it into the air with a scream, challenging God’s supremacy on earth. The clunk of stone on skull ends the euphoria abruptly, and Robbie slumps face down into the ice-cold water, slimy kelp his pillow for the minute it takes them to drag his body from the laughing waves.

Now there’s a look in your eye

like black holes in the sky

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Claire’s married now, with three kids and a body that would have shamed her back in those heady days. She sold her freedom cheaply, to a bald man with a fake tan and a big car. She still loves Jasper. He senses her spirit seek him from Valium dreams, begging him to join her in the Indian jungle, assist her in recapturing those lost moments, the last time she felt alive.

You reached for the secret too soon

You cried for the moon

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Furbo is no more, pillaged by property whores during the good years. Positive ions replaced by the stench of raw sewerage as the new rich gradually sink into the filthy cesspool created by their greed and opulence. Henry hasn’t been back in years. It’s not his home anymore, isn’t anybody’s home really, just a showcase of human vanity. Henry opens his eyes and looks across at Jasper, who’s skinning up on his lap. He rolls the spliff and looks over it at Henry as he licks the skins.

You were caught on the crossfire

Of childhood and stardom

Blown on the steel breeze

C’mon you target for faraway laughter

C’mon you stranger, you legend, you martyr

And shine

“Jesus, that track brings me back.”

“Sure does.”

Jasper sparks up and inhales deeply, closing his eyes as he leans back and lets blue smoke seep from his mouth and curl towards the ceiling, like an ancient dervish escaping its earthly vessel.

“So Henry”

“What?”

“How does it work exactly?”

“It has a rechargeable battery, should knock a few hours out of it.”

Jasper giggles as he leans forward to pass the spliff.

“Not the iPod, the piss. How does the piss work?”

“Oh! As far as I know, this time of year a specific magic mushroom grows, and they feast on the fuckers.”

“Why don’t we just eat the mushrooms?”

“They’re poison. A single mushroom is enough to kill a human. These gifted beasts filter out the toxins and piss out the good bits.”

“I wonder which intrepid explorer first discovered that.”

“Not only that, but when they eat enough of the tiny mushrooms, the toxins make their noses glow red.”

“Hence the song.”

“Exactly”

Henry hands Jasper the spliff and both men turn to watch the flames, waiting expectantly for their respective time machines. Jasper’s is first to arrive, whisking him to Kenya, and the coastal town of Malindi. It’s his first night staying at Kenjack, low budget accommodation, which doubles as a brothel. He’s smoking on the balcony when she joins him. Maureen takes the spliff from his hand and they smoke together in the dark, angelic face lit at intervals as she pulls on the joint, dark curls blowing across her forehead in the breath exhaled by the Indian Ocean. She leads Jasper by the hand into her room, careful to slide the heavy bolt across, locking them into a concrete, windowless cell.

You reached for the secret too soon

You cried for the moon

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Henry can’t settle on any one time or place. Flashbacks flitter furiously around inside his mind like caged budgies on speed. He senses the potential timelessness of experience, how all these events can on some level, happen simultaneously. His whole lifetime condensed into one moment, containing all the smaller moments in a single capsule, the way an atom contains protons and electrons, with consciousness being the nucleus of it all, the control centre for all knowledge. He feels tantalisingly close to the answers, can almost pluck them from the air, if they would just slow down for a moment. Perhaps he can speed up.

Threatened by shadows at night

And exposed in the light

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

“Henry! Henry!”

“What?”

“What do ya call those Northern Lights?”

“It’s Purple Haze.”

“What?”

“It’s Purple Haze.”

“It’s not purple haze, well there’s purple bits in it… it’s the Northern Lights I tell ya.”

“It’s not Northern Lights. I bought the stuff for fuck’s sake. I know what it is.”

“Stuff? What stuff? What did you buy?”

Henry opens his eyes and looks across at Jasper, who’s staring intently at some point behind Henry’s right shoulder.

“The weed you muppet, I bought the weed…and it’s Purple Haze.”

Jasper turns his head to assess Henry, who is leaning forward in the chair, clutching the arms as if he’s suspended two-hundred foot in the air. His face is all scrunched up, like he just bit into a lemon. Jasper can barely make out glinting eyes through tiny slits and bursts out laughing at the intensity pouring from the contortion. His loud laugh shocks Henry, who lurches backwards onto his throne, before sitting bolt upright and looking left and right and left again, like a paranoid meerkat. His eyes finally settle on a guffawing Jasper, firelight glinting off  bared teeth as he howls manically with head thrown back. For a moment Henry fears the worst, fears that his good friend has mutated into a werewolf and is about to devour him.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” He hisses, as the howls continue, eventually fading to sporadic gurgles as Jasper struggles for breath.

“Jasper!”

“Ah that’s brilliant.”

“What?”

“I’m not on about the weed?”

“Weed? What weed? What the fuck are you on about?”

“The lights man, the fucking Northern Lights, out the window…look!”

Henry turns around expectantly towards where Jasper is pointing, hoping all will be revealed. He sees nothing out of the ordinary, apart from two Eskimos standing in a darkened corner.

“How did they get in here?”

“Not there you clown, come over here.”

Jasper pulls him over by the shoulder and points at the window. Henry sees now and settles on the rug at Jasper’s feet, transfixed.

“That’s fucking amazing.”

“Sure is.

Shine on you Crazy Diamond is replaced by Gimmie Shelter. Its smooth sensuality seeps through the men like warm milk as they watch the universe perform through the window, losing themselves in the flickering multi-colour swirls dancing a tango across the night sky, bright tongues licking the darkness. Red and orange and yellow and blue, a temporary gateway to another dimension, luring them in with its obscene beauty. Jasper is twelve years old – Halloween night. Brothers stand in the drizzle as he attempts to curse the bonfire alight. The wood is too wet to ignite. He won’t use petrol, it’s too dangerous, not even a tiny drop to get it started. Their weeks labour wasted, father a failure to two sons, who look longingly at the glow from their neighbour’s garden as they return dejected to their mother in the kitchen, the nearby squeals of delight burning their ears.

“Jasper!”

“What?”

“Did you spot those two Eskimos?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Henry is sitting on the ghats as dawn breaks over the Ganges. Candles float in lotus cradles on canoes of banana leaves, silent lovers lamenting the loss of their dark shroud. He watches as the first corpse arrives, wrapped in white cloth and covered in a bright red blanket with yellow trim. Men hustle and bustle the body down the steps and onto the pyre, women wail as the fire gathers strength and devours their loved one. There’s a herd of black cows in the water below, an Indian boy brushing his teeth between them. When the corpse is burnt they sweep the ashes into the sacred river, the main vein into the heart of the universe.

Jasper is on Koh Tao, eating Tom Ka Gai, drinking cold Singha, listening to the dissection of the days diving from an adjoining table. There were three White-Tips sighted at Chumporn Pinnicle, a turtle at White Rock. Tommy McCarthy interrupts with his news of a mermaid sighting on the beach late last night, not twenty metres from where they now sit, with his own two eyes. He looks at the divers, deadpan. They nod respectfully; momentarily silent, wishing themselves submerged in the safety of the warm sea. The scents of weed, jasmine and green curry mingle seductively in the awkwardness. Geckos observe silently from above.

Three drunken Aussies set off fireworks on the beach, breaking the tension. All watch them shoot into the night sky, exploding into a thousand sparkles that cascade dying down into a wet embrace. An off-course rocket shoots into the restaurant with a piercing whistle, hitting the bamboo ceiling before falling down into the long black hair of an English girl. Tommy is first to react to the instant fireball, drenching it with water before it catches, saving her from disaster.

Cockroaches taste like pears, dry pears. A drunken night in Pattaya: playing pool in a Boy-Bar with Seamus Kelly and his young lover. A lady-boy takes a break from wailing karaoke to offer a bag of deep-fried roaches around. For reasons that Henry will never understand, he’s fearful of losing face in front of his gay companions and eats the vile creature, biting off the legs one by one, then the crunchy head, and taking two bites to finish the two-inch body, just as he had observed the Thai’s doing. There is a leg caught in his throat for hours. No amount of beer will wash it down, and late that night, as he’s dosing off, Henry feels the cockroach crawling drunkenly up from his stomach, hell-bent on revenge.

“Henry!”

“What?”

“Do ya remember Tommy Mc Carthy?”

“Sure do…mad fucker…sound though. Where is he now?”

“Banged up in the Bangkok Hilton.”

“Fuck off.”

“Yep, got busted with a load of pills in Hat Rin about two years ago at one of the full-moon parties…remember that bunch of Israelis?”

“Who were fighting with the Thais?”

“Exactly, those scumbags ratted him out.”

“Fuckers! Still, at least he has plenty of food.”

“What?”

“Sure that place is full of cockroaches.”

Jasper looks down at the back of his friend’s head, and decides not to pursue conversation any further.  Henry has obviously slipped into another dimension, leaving Jasper a little jealous. They watch together as the Northern Lights eventually fade in the sky, Henry sitting on the rug at Jaspers feet. The iPod ran out of juice while they were away, leaving the storm the sole soundtrack to the scattered fragments of memories blowing around the room. The door of the woodshed is left open. They hear it banging outside. It will stay that way. The cabin is almost in darkness. Henry reaches to the right and throws a log onto the embers, before stretching across the floor to grope for his beer.

“Oh my god, look at that!”

Henry bolts upright, certain that Jasper has caught sight of the Eskimo intruders.

“What?”

“A huge explosion, look…a meteor shower.”

Henry looks and sure enough the sky is filled with speeding orange spheres, shooting up to be enveloped by black. It all looks familiar somehow, like déjà vu. Realisation dawns on him as Jasper whistles in wonderment. His laughter is sudden and violent and takes Jasper by surprise, making him knock his beer off the arm of the chair. He looks down at Henry, who is choking at his feet, rolling around on the mat like a spaniel in from the rain.

“What? What is it?”

Henry lies on his back choking, beer froth splattered on his face, tears streaming from his eyes. He turns onto his side to save himself, manages to catch his breath, then bursts into laughter again. Jasper kicks him in an attempt to distract him long enough to share the cause of such mirth.

“What you fucker? What’s so fucking funny?”

Henry is choked up. He pulls a tissue from his pocket and blows his nose, before throwing the rag onto the fire. They both watch it flare and sizzle momentarily before Henry giggles away to himself again.

“For fuck’s sake, what is it?”

“It’s the Northern Lights…a meteor shower…what are we like?”

Henry breaks up again, infecting Jasper with his mirth, despite Jasper’s position of ignorance.

“What about the Northern Lights?”

“There are no Northern Lights dude…there isn’t even a window.”

Jasper looks down at his dear friend, who is now kneeling before him with an inane grin on his face, gigantic black pupils threatening to suck what little light there is out of the room, a big stoned lemur. Henry senses that he’s not getting through.

“Alright, look out the window there.”

Jasper turns towards the window. A faint glow on the horizon is the only remnant of the spectacle that kept them enthralled for the past hour or so. Henry picks up a log and throws it onto the fire. Jasper immediately perks up in his chair and points.

“Oh my god, look…”

He stops mid-sentence, looks at the fire, back at the window, back at the fire, then into Henry’s eyes. There’s a moment of silence before both explode simultaneously, Jasper falling onto the floor beside Henry. The laughter is violent and unstoppable, the kind of laughter that prevents breathing, and sends piss squirting uncontrollably down the leg. Even the wind joins in the mirth, rattling the front door in jubilation, as if it had been eavesdropping all along; waiting for the punchline. Jasper is first to regain some semblance of control.

“The fucking mirror, the fire in the fucking mirror…fuck’s sake.”

“Sure there was never a window there.”

Both cackle away as they climb into their respective chairs, turning them to face the fire, so the heat can reach their damp crotches. Jasper reaches into the ice-box and pulls out two beers, handing one over to Henry, who cracks it open with his lighter before taking a grateful gulp. They sit looking into the fire, drinking and giggling, both acutely aware that life rarely gets better that this. It’s some time before Henry breaks the silence.

“Jasper!”

“What?”

“They’re called the Aurora Borealis”

“What?”

“Is that not what you asked me?”

“What? Sure I didn’t ask you anything.”

“Ages ago, about the Northern lights…they’re called Aurora Borealis.”

“It was just the fire in the mirror dude.”

“I fucking know that.”

Henry glares across at Jasper, who is sunk into the cushions with head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.

“Jasper”

“What?”

“Should we drink more piss?”

“Definitely”

Lyrics, Shine on You Crazy Diamond copyright of Pink Floyd Music Ltd.

They sat out at noon in a line, Susie beside Eamon, Gary beside Jenny. They uncovered their skin like new ground for the hot sun to shine on.  They drank gold cans from the blue square of a freezer box. The car ticked, its metal doors were open like wings to let the radio play in wrinkles on the still water.

Susie could kiss him right there as they hugged and never go back to work again maybe. The four of them worked nights in a factory making those plastic things for the tops of syringes. They took the job out of school saying ’six months and I’m gone’ but not believing it. They got lost in the nights on the sodium floor. They forgot about the sun, looking out, from the canteen, into the car park marked in lines of streetlights at the frost or rain, or the silence that’s always somehow waiting at the gate.

After all those days without a drop of sunlight on his eyelids, he could kiss her right there for every time he almost did.  Those quiet pockets at the turn of hallways when nobody was watching. He could kiss her right there and take her away to the sea, and she could let him.

They’d been drinking through the afternoon.

‘I’d love to see the sea’, Susie said.

Eamon was rubbing sun cream into her making her white skin whiter.   She sat up and flicked her sunglasses back down onto her nose. There were birds chirp chirping in the green trees. A plane passed over and droned louder than usual with all that blue to sing in. The heat tightened in around their eyes.

‘I haven’t seen the sea in years’.

Eamon opened a can with a Tss. A bit of breeze threw the trees of balance and sprinkled the ground with cool squares of almost shade. Blades of grass frayed at their toes.

‘And what about work?’ Eamon said.

Piles of rocks jutted out from the shore where a small harbour had been cleared. A rusty line of barb marked out some farmer’s right to the squelchy ground.

She could kiss him right there and be new and in love like the young couple who were there that afternoon. They pulled up in the hottest part of the day. They might have been eighteen – dressed up for their first day in the sun – brown cheekbones falling from sunglasses. They looked around like they were looking for somewhere quieter.

‘She’s gorgeous’, Susie said.

‘She is’, Eamon said.

‘Eamon’, she said, then to no one in particular.

‘I wish I was that young’

‘You’re only twenty-two’, Gary said.

He could kiss her right there with Eamon watching from the woods, with just enough light thrown up by the fire for him to see. They’d built the fire earlier near where others’d left circles of charred stone and burnt cans on the grass. They were sitting around the fire as the blue night squeezed the red evening onto wisps of cloud and the trails of planes. They’d started into the spirits when Susie stood up.

‘Let’s go to the sea’ she said.

Eamon snorted through his nose and picked at hairs that’d curled into gold on his chest.

‘I wouldn’t mind’ Gary said.

‘Gary…’ Jenny said.

Susie grabbed Eamon by the wrists and started to pull him saying, joking maybe.

‘C’mon’

His skin was humming with browny red.

‘We can watch the sun come up tomorrow’ she said.

‘Will we fuck’ he said.

He flicked her away so she fell on the grass. No one did anything for a second. A swan skidded to a stop on the lake and unzipped its metal surface. She got back up, pressed blades of grass down with her small, white feet and dusted herself down carefully. She plopped into her chair and picked up a glossy magazine and started to flick the pages with her red painted fingers. The pages ripped where she grabbed them and made a noise like chopping.

‘I’m off for a piss’ Eamon said.

She could have kissed him right there for the night when they were younger when they almost did. It was after a youth disco, standing in the car park of St. Peters square.  Someone’d been stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver, blood spraying on the wall as Sweet Caroline played and everything. Everyone had to wait outside and Susie was shivering and he fancied her from seeing her coming out of the girl’s school, so gave her his jacket. They stood there and almost kissed as lads in hoods threw hollow eyes at the lights from squad cars.

She could have kissed him right there as she heard the sound of sticks breaking that could been a fox but was actually Jenny, dropping the sticks she was carrying as she watched their charcoal impressions come together as Gary pulled his jumper down over Susie’s head. Her lifting her arms up straight: him swiping a stray hair from her lips. And Eamon could see them too from among the smell of leaves. Arms tangling and shining with that sheen that night gives, heads hanging at opposite angles and lake behind them licking at the moonlit stones. They could kiss right there and get into the car and keep speeding west without stopping so fast the gear changes sound like the breaths you’d take when you’re kissing.

…The soul is an old graveyard…

I came into this small room, through a door over there. Right here, in the middle, was a table with a page and a typewriter on it. At the right side of the table, stuck, point first into the floor, was a large hunting knife. There was a window open over there. Stuck to it was one of those classic orange vacancy signs blinking on and off. I knew that knife was down there. I reached down to grip it. That fucking knife… Cuts me…every time… I stamped my hand onto the page and the sign went out and when it came back on it said No-Vacancy.

This is reality. The dream is over. I’m awake… The first time I came here was many years ago. I loved it then, and I still do; this is my cinema paradiso.

This is one of the rooms, one of many, in the tenements of writing. We are on about the fifth floor. There are two more floors above me. Just across the way, separated by the canal, is another seven-story tenement building, crammed full with windows looking into small rooms. The canal is one of those that festers the outskirts coming right to the brink on either side. We are at the end of the block.

To the right, out there, stretching out to the horizon lies a vast blue-grey landscape that is cut in half by a canal-lock bridge that spans over a deep gorge. This bridge is the only way to cross to this side. To the left here running up as far away as the eye can see are tenement buildings. I don’t know how far up they go; I am always let off here. On the facing wall, pacing about in dimly lit rooms, there are hundreds of employees. Some are typing…but not many. It looks like a chicken coop of some kind.

Down there, on the canal, there are Gondoleroes, passing back and forth, on gondolas. They stand towering at the back, their huge capes flowing behind them as they work the pole into the water and drive the boats on. Their wide-brimmed hats conceal their faces. They pass there always, day or night.

I remember the first time I was taken here after what seemed like an endless journey, along the canal-ways that wind through the blue-grey reaches, from the other side of the gorge, over the bridge, through the cerebral marshes. I was down there in one of the Gondolas, the boat-man towering over me, as he worked into the pole, the vast landscape, was spread out behind us and there in front, on either side of the canal, right from the brink, were the tenements of writing. Many other boat-men joined us there, from adjacent canals, some empty, some carrying employees. There were many gondolas in front of us driving ahead.

As we passed along the tenements, the windows began to open high up, and suddenly, the whole air was filled with pages. They were fluttering down all around me. The whole sky overhead was blocked out by blueprints, their pages opened out like confetti, like doves, wings spread, fluttering, coming in to roost. None of them hit the water.

The rower let me off at a door that opened onto the lip of the canal and he told me to go in. I walked up the stairwell and went in the first door that was open – for me it is always on the fifth or sixth floor. And always on this side…I don’t know why. I went in. The window was open.

It said “vacancy” then just like this time, always the same. One single page on the table and the hunting knife stuck into the floor. The very first time I tried to pull that knife out of the floor I cut myself. Every time I take that knife out of the floor, by accident, I cut myself. On the page was written my job, my blueprint, and that if I decided to undertake it I should sign below on the dotted line. I did not hesitate a second. I never hesitate. To be in the brotherhood, I thought to myself, was worth anything…I signed that line and, just like this time, the “NO VACANCY”“ appeared and it stopped blinking.  Suddenly I realised that I could not really leave this room until the blueprint was completed. It is a contract, a contract that you cannot annul. Everything was different, irrevocable. Like how criminals must feel after the deed. The world is different. The past had been some form of sleep. The white sheet with my signature on it, right there on the dotted line, snug under its wing, shot into its breast. I would never escape it; it would always be there like a ghost when the light was turned off. I could never leave anyway. How? I could steal out and haunt the marshes like one of the phantoms that we saw on the long odyssian journey that eventually brought me here. We passed every manner of creature.

There are horse-like beasts out there that appeared at the canal banks, stubborned against crags, braying and hoofing the yells of unperfected burdens into the water. The moon is more like a surgeon’s optical nerve, a fibre optic, pushed in through the firmament, working around, gawking at the mystery out here… When it appears, the seminal dogs of the outskirts gather on outcrops and bark-out as yet unlived desires. Like the ravenous bird shadowing Hansel I was rowed here under a luminous though unlit skyline.

Finally we come to the front two gable walls of the tenements of writing, one on each side of the canal. It is a long journey’s end through a land both beautiful and terrible. There, on these two gable walls, is written, what the Rower said is our code: Hover above the troubles of the world. Have faith in your strength. Be compassionate and open. You have come down through the generations and generations of mankind. You belong to no nation. You belong to the brotherhood.

It went dark. I could see nothing. Time passed. I was awakened by the sound of a trumpet. There was a thin pile of pages on the table. I heard yells of triumph coming from out there.

Just out the window and there they are, hundreds of them… The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They come from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on.

Confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down to the gondolas. The air is filled with pages, with finished blueprints. The Gondoleros swooping over the pole, driving the Gondolas on. Where to, who knows. The brotherhood doesn’t know. I’m sure of that. They look different on that side of the canal. There is no way for us to cross the canal, and no way for them to get over here. They look like office workers. I’ve even heard that they try to smuggle themselves over here dressed up in rags and scuffed shoes.  Nothing annoys me more than a rich kid in purposefully scuffed shoes. You can’t pay off a gondolero. I don’t know why they would want to get over here. Maybe it’s the arabesque hypnogogic seaport, where captains name their ships after drowned women, riddled with polyglot-hustlers, always twilight… The black-dome sky spins like a prostitute’s skirt and the stars flash like lice and flit around a swollen gonorrhoea-moon that always hangs above the old city walls. It is full of toothless painters, actors that never get to act, writers trying to salvage ripped-up pages from among the nets – past the harbour walls is an ink-dead sea.

It’s not like that over there; they are all marked out by time. They start the same time every day and they finish the same time every day. There is one guy over there and he is always there as I arrive, at his desk, groomed, clean, efficient. He never leaves that desk. He is always smiling; he is always typing. He finishes, throws his blueprint out and he watches it, every time, as it opens up, like a quilt on the air, as it goes down and closes into the gondola. And then he is gone. He is usually back again, in the same room, before I even get out of here. writing away, smiling… And then the day comes, as it always does, when he finishes! He opens his window. And down it goes, the blueprint…opening up like a quilt, watching it…all the way down…to the gondolas. The rowers never look up.

I pace the room. I think too much. My heart has an axe in it. I leave, I return, others leave and return, some don’t return. The ones that cannot return have all returned to the one word, and all the years of their gone lives, all those words, those explanations, those hopes, promises, all forged back again into the one word that they started with – their name. I repeat the names of those I love that cannot return, again and again – words that will always be a mystery to me, they fall on me like trees in the forest.

There is a riddle: Only dead fish go with the flow yet struggle against the current and you will eventually drown.

This is the paradox we are all in. Only dead fish go with the flow, only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current…and you will drown.

I came to the point where there are no more signposts – I don’t know if I can do this.

The brotherhood? The muse is the whore of Babylon. The whore for all the babbling poets of the world – mistress to all, deceiver to all! I am Ajax, mad and deluded, slaughtering the sheep; I am Heracles bludgeoning his family; I am Oedipus, the last riddle solved, blinded, walking with three legs, into exile; I am Aristotle’s dramatic alcoholic poets searching the Illiad for what was unsaid; blinded like Homer, like O’Carolan hearing your voice like a distance -either far or near; I am Owen Roe O’Sullivan, after the Geraldines were crushed, added to the Bolg, In the dew of morning, weak indeed, as a Poet, as the pen fell from his hand; I am Rimbaud, abused and spoilt – deranged at the end of Verlain’s nozzle; I am Mahon squinting through the key hole at the disused darkness; I am Heaney of the bog corpses remembering memories that don’t remember themselves; I am the butler’s swan-twilight diminishing, unclamourously, year by year;

I am Keats when with dying burning eyes,

He stared across the Spanish steps -the tongue

Of his twenty six years in wild surmise-

Distraught, cloyed, among cloudy trophies hung.

The great whore of Babylon… It is not love that is evergreen amongst the deciduous but acceptance.

No bank accounts are signed over here. No new bibles to read, no new techniques, no new schools – the cutting edge is a very old blade.

Winter is coming. Flocks of desire, in the geometry of arrowheads, are migrating to the south. The seminal dogs of the outskirts are barking…gondoleros on the canal…in the cerebral-wind flutter the newspaper headlines of old dreams…

Look at them. Hundreds of them… The enchanted children of Hamlen. Here they are. This is where the piper brought them. This is where the melody led. That magic enchanting melody…

The magic mountain…The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They follow the melody from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on. Blueprints, confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down. Bent over the pole, the Gondelero, drives the gondola on, in a long cape and a wide-brimmed hat that conceals his face. He has gone past the outer gable walls. The tenements of writing are now at his back, getting smaller and smaller, as he drives the boat further out. He is taking the blueprint to the line of demarcation, to the border… He passes over this point as he rows into your minds, rowing through the canals of your brains, rowing outwards, outwards from the tenements of writing, rowing into the blue-grey reaches, to some other point where the blueprint can be fitted-out from the wardrobe of your imaginations, in the disguise that will take it over the line of demarcation, over the border, materialised, with you, when you go into the world, into life, into time.

I will finish the blueprint, eventually – even if it kills me. I will get out of here.

The last time I finished, I picked it up and went to the window. That amount of words, I thought to myself, just to get back to the first word that I thought of when I agreed to sign. When I thought about the length of time that had passed I told myself how true it is that in here the flames in the fire of time do not burn. I tossed it out the window without watching it spread out, without watching the Gondolero, without looking out over the landscape, the sky, the brotherhood. I looked at the table again and there was another page sitting on it. The dotted line is here – just listen and follow the melody.

The answer to the riddle, the paradox – only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current and you will drown: there are two rivers. The one out there they call life, and the one in here. The road in…is the only road out. Knife to the floor, man to the door – I lifted the hunting knife and threw it point first into the floor. The No Vacancy went off and then Vacancy blinked on. Just like when the rower told me there was a vacancy – he’s now telling someone else that there is a vacancy and to get into the Gondola. The last time I walked out that door, out of the tenements of writing and back into life, out of here, into time, the last thought I had was: from the venom comes the serum…from the venom comes the serum.

Within a week of moving in, I saved his life. We had gone for a walk by the harbour. He fell in off the top end where the fishing boats moored and fishermen cast away ripped nets beside the wall. He couldn’t swim. His head was under the water but his two hands were sticking out like they were waiting to catch a ball. I could still see his face under the lapping surface like I was looking into a dream-mirror. Then it felt like he was the one looking into the mirror and I was the reflection and it was me that was drowning. I didn’t like the feeling – that’s why I threw him the life buoy. It all felt like a dream.

For the following two years I had a recurring nightmare of his submerged face, looking at me through the glazed up mirror of the surface of the sea. I read that when the head of something goes under the water it then belongs to the sea and that it was bad luck to take back from the sea what belonged to it. I loved the sea but never went near the sea after that, never. Two years after I saved him, as he was sleeping, I pulled the duvet over his face like the waves going back over him, and shot him in the head. He didn’t even gasp for air.

There was a high wall at the bottom of the garden and on the other side of the wall was the graveyard. I could see it from his bedroom window, through the dirty yellow curtains with red flowers on them. There was a mist over the graves and the crosses looked like they were protruding up through clouds from a steepled, holy city. I’ve never been to Prague but that’s how I imagined it to look. I always wanted to go there. In the movies, after the actors kill someone they never know where to put the body – I thought it was obvious: bury him in the graveyard. No one looks for the dead amongst the dead. Nobody really wants to see the dead again. They only search for them in fields and along the beach when they have a faint glimmer of hope that they may still be alive – that’s why they are looking amongst the living.

I must have subliminally planned it all because my wife was away with visiting their mother. As she was going to be gone for a week, I stuck Ten-To-Two-Blue in the deep freeze with his knees hunched up like he was pretending to be a bomb, jumping into a lake.

I walked out onto the street and went past the front doors of our neighbour’s houses. I stopped at the gates of the graveyard and, as I entered, I looked overhead to the grey horseshoe column of stone that made up the gateway. The cemetery looked like a town hit by a bomb or a starved village drowned to the eaves. It was early morning; the sun was rising over the frosty grass. Two gravediggers were digging a fresh grave. I stood watching them digging until they had disappeared below the ground and only their shovels cut up into the air as they tossed the new-born soil on top of the pile at the side and the white clouds of their breath floated up, hung there, dumb like ghosts, and dissipated.

I went into the church and sat down in the warm bath of vacant silence. Fake gold and the amateur paintings adorned the walls and the altar. I closed my eyes and laid my head back. I heard a granny shuffling in – once you hear that sound, you never forget it. She halted at the side of my pew and edged in beside me. “The burial,” she whispered, “will be later today, at two. At two tonight,” she went on, after a short pause, “’cause that’s just it, some come and some go.”

We are all conspirators at the end of it all, I thought to myself, as I walked outside into the sunlight. The grave diggers were standing beside the barrow of fresh earth, smoking, laughing – only one was talking, but both were laughing. They both wore hats now, like farmer hats. The one who was listening wasn’t smoking much. He was holding the cigarette between his first and second fingers, flicking it steadily from behind with his thumb. He was also looking around, scanning across the rooftops of grey crosses taking in me at the cave-door of the church, though not with his head, just with his eyes. He wasn’t listening at all.

The day passed as days pass. I watched it darken from Ten-To-Two-Blue’s window, beside the yellow curtains, looking out as the mist covered the graves and the crosses, like church spires pointing out over cloud.

At 2am I took Ten-To-Two-Blue out of the freezer then slid him easily down the hallway, eyes locked on him him, dragged him out the back door and down the garden and managed, after standing on the bench, to get him over the wall and dropped him onto the grass at the side of the graveyard. He landed the same way that a table would, on its back, legs upward. Then he toppled over slowly onto his side. I got the spade and the ladder from the shed and climbed over, hauled the ladder up and climbed down into the graveyard.

I didn’t want to bury him anymore. I was sick of him. I wanted to go back in time and unsave him. The grass, in the torchlight, looked like it was sprinkled with sugar. He lay on the grass, frozen into the shape of a question-mark. The bullet hole looked like a third eye, a mark of clairvoyance; a black hole that held no future – a doomed onwards to which his twisted face gave testament to. I turned the torch off and dragged him across the gravel but he jarred against the loose stone. It was nearly impossible as I was trying to hold the spade as well. I gripped him at his crooked knees and heaved him over my shoulder, against my face, a double coldness of death and ice; a question-mark-cross. I was thinking about the futility of flesh, the broken absurdity of free will. A night-bird shrieked out as it flew, its shrill call echoing through the icy silence.

I found the freshly dug grave, lidded over again and began digging. I breathed heavily and stopped listening then; I set myself to hear nothing further, thinking of the gravedigger that wasn’t listening either, that just stood there scanning the tops of the crosses like he was overlooking the spires of an old city that used to be holy, somewhere like Prague. A giant with bent leg up on the shoulder of the spade like it was a rooftop looking out over the crosses that rose up into the sky, from a hundred churches; church towers, like the hilted handles of knives with the blade driven in between the ribs of streets; holy streets where enlightened ones wonder how it ever happened, how this city conceived its own idea of life and death and the great universe washing over everything like a hidden tide.

I dug and I dug, till the walls rose over me, deeper and deeper, yet all the while I stood with the gravedigger that didn’t listen, our heels on the shoulders of roofs looking over the crosses that rose into the sky from a steepled city. I told jokes and we both laughed, though he wasn’t listening. He held his cigarette between his first finger and his middle finger and flicked it with his thumb from behind. I was the talker beside him, and me laughing too with the digging done. Then I was back at the church, back in the pew with my eyes closed and my head back in the warm bath of vacant silence, back hearing the granny shuffling up the aisle and edging in beside me and saying again, the burial will be tonight, at two tonight. The thud of wood brought me back to where I really was, in darkness, hemmed in by the root-walls. I looked up. It was like looking up from an alleyway – a thin canal of sky.

I used the spade as a ledge for my foot, to get myself out, away from the bone-carpet – a capsuled, wood and ivory network of unlived dreams under the skyline of crosses. I lowered Ten-To-Two-Blue in on top of the coffin. In the torchlight, he was the colour of red wine. A stolen question mark that belonged to the sea, whose bones the sea would never get. When I stood at the side of the grave, he looked like a young lady, head turned and looking away, her exposed soft neck dreaming of a tender hand.

I filled it in and went back to the wall at the bottom of the garden. I climbed back up the ladder, threw the spade over and sat on the ridge and looked back over God’s steepled acre. The mist covered the frosty grass like a filter that could sift through the severed earth and net whatever was spectral about Ten-To-Two-Blue to drag his submerged phantom back to the sea. And with him all that was holy.

In grey light, mist moved over the grave-tops. The dawn was edging to the side of the world as though breathing heat into the double coldness of darkness and night; as though holding the earth close to its face, as though carrying it over its shoulder in the rising waters of the engulfing universe and even though drowning itself and always belonging to the sea thereafter, holding it up with outstretched arms, like a caught ball, over the ruthlessness of the waves, knowing also that it was alone, that it had no dream-double standing in safety on the pier, where sailors cast their ripped nets beside the wall; and no reflection standing  there dumbly willing to throw the life buoy even though its madrugada’s head has gone under and now belonged to the sea.

Fintan has just turned forty.  He has an athletic build, and a boyish face with sombre brown eyes that lend him a certain gravitas.  The bar of his new glasses runs horizontally covering the line of his eyebrows and giving him a blank expression.  As he flicks through the charts he wonders what the nature of these interactions will be.   Many consultations are purely about the body part.  Others have little or nothing to do with it. People use many levers to control each other.  Sometimes they like to recruit a professional in that game.  Husband and wife or parent and child, sometimes bring in their illness or injury as a toy to share, for you to witness, as they coyly play out their like or dislike of each other.

A movement in the car park catches his eye.  A woman in a nurse’s uniform gets out of her car slowly.  His uncle used to swear that he could diagnose patients by observing them walk to the surgery door.  Fintan sees the first two patients. Next up is Chris Lyons, with her son Peadar’s chart attached.  He pictures her, a sprightly no-nonsense paediatric nurse, married to an army man.  He presses the green button to indicate that he is free and looks at the wet sycamore leaves pressing against the window like children’s faces peering in.  It’s so strange to share a bed with Aoife and not touch.  The woman he married has become a stranger.  When did that happen?

A soft knock on the door and Chris walks in.  She has put on weight since he last saw her.

‘Hello, Dr Fintan,’

‘Hello, Chris, take a seat.  So what can I do for you?’

‘I saw Caroline for my well-woman check and she asked me to see you about my blood pressure.’

Fintan flicks through her chart.

‘I see.  It’s up despite the medication.  Let me just check it again.’

Chris rolls up her sleeve and he wraps the cuff around her arm.  She reads the result before he does.

‘150 over 100.  That’s higher than with the practice nurse.’

Fintan makes a note and reads the previous entries then sits back in his chair and looks at her.

‘How are things at home?’

Chris smiles the uncomfortable smile of those who hate to show weakness.

‘Not great really.  But that’s the nature of it.’

Fintan resists the urge to speak.  He knows his eyes show more compassion than any words.  He waits.

‘Well, you know Cathal and I split up last June.  He moved back to the barracks and Peadar is with me.  It’s for the best but it’s still awful.  Awful no matter what way you manage it.’

Fintan lets the silence sit again and then speaks when it is clear she isn’t going to.

‘How are you sleeping?’

‘Oh, not bad really.  I’m grand until a few minutes after waking up when I realise the kind of day I have ahead of me.’

‘You’re working?’

‘Yes, thank God, work is therapy.  I can lose myself in it, distract myself with the sick babies and their families.  It should make me feel lucky.  But it doesn’t.’

‘Are you getting any time to yourself?’

‘Yeah, I decided to take Fridays off.  I’m back painting in the tech every week, so that’s good.’

‘How is Peader coping?’

Chris’s eyes fill with tears and she looks at the ceiling and out the window waiting to collect herself before she speaks.

‘He’s so angry it breaks my heart.  I can’t win with him.’

‘What year is he in now?’

‘Transition year.  I can’t get him out of bed in the mornings.  Can’t get him to do anything for me.’

‘How is he with Cathal?’

Chris’s face hardens.

‘Worse,’ she says.

Silence resumes again.

‘Is he seeing the school counsellor or anyone else?’

‘No.  He refuses.’

Something has been lost.  He doesn’t know what.  He back-peddles.

‘How about sports?  What’s he into?   Is he hurling?’

Chris flushes and her eyes scan the walls as if for an escape. She stares at him with an inscrutable look then speaks in a deadpan voice.

‘Peadar’s problem isn’t just the separation.  Would that it were, we could find a way through it.  You’ve heard the rumours I’m sure about Packy, the hurling coach?’

Fintan feels the hair lift on the back of his neck.  He wants to throw up.  He says nothing and concentrates on not changing his facial expression.

‘Well, they’re true, it seems.  God help us all, they’re true.  He was only nine.  I trusted him.  You don’t expect anything like this will ever happen to you or anyone belonging to you.  That slime ball brother-in-law.  He dropped him home after training.  No big deal.  I can’t describe the things he did to him and what he had him do.  I can’t.’  Chris puts her hands over her mouth and starts crying.

Fintan sits rigid in his seat, staring.   He smells that mixture of earth and sweat and remembers the raindrops coalescing on the steamed up windscreen.

‘How long?’  he says.

‘What?’ she says looking surprised.

‘How long did he abuse him?’

‘All that summer.  Peadar wouldn’t go back hurling after that.  Remember his back pain?’

Fintan opens Peadar’s chart and reads “2001, non-specific back pain, normal examination, normal x-rays, mother anxious, boy being bullied at school? Note given to stay off sports.”

‘How did you find out?’

‘Cathal brought Peadar camping last year.   Part of cubs, with a group of lads.  They had a fight.  Something about undressing in front of others.  Cathal, tough guy, teased Peadar in front of the others about being shy about his body.  Peadar lost the head.  “At least I’m not a fucking pervert like your sick bastard brother!” he said.   They wouldn’t speak to each other afterwards, haven’t since.  Peadar told me the whole thing.  It just poured out of him like pus from an abscess. He cried and cried.  How could anyone do such things to a child?  And he kept it in for 6 years, festering away.  I’ll never forgive myself for letting this happen.’

Fintan needs to wrap this up. The feeling of wet polyester cold against his chest.  The callused hand on the back of his neck.

‘Cathal didn’t believe him.’

‘That’s right,’ says Chris, looking surprised. ‘Imagine. He sided with his brother over his own child.  Can you believe that?  Well, that was it for me.  I could put up with a lot I shouldn’t have but not that.  The shutters came down.  But of course just our luck, Packy is two years dead now.  So no confrontation or admission of guilt is possible.’

The telephone rings, the receptionist reminds him that the next three patients are waiting.   Fintan’s chest remembers the feel of the held-back hug Aoife gave him that morning as she left with the baby.

‘Dr Fintan, I’ve taken up too much of your time.  I’m sorry.  You’ve been so understanding.’

‘Come back next month Chris, take this script for your medication and we’ll see how you’re doing then.  Mind yourself.’

At lunchtime Fintan leaves the surgery, buys a sandwich and a coffee and sits  on a bench at the docks.  A crane is loading a mountain of rusting metal from the dockside onto a ship. A few milliseconds of time delay occurs between the release of the scrap metal onto the pile by the giant claw and the clunking sound it makes as it lands and settles.   His hand shakes as he brings the Styrofoam cup to his lips.

He puts his 9-year-old self in the patient seat to quiz him.  Why didn’t he, an intelligent boy with educated parents, tell anyone?  Because grown-ups are strange people.  They say one thing and mean another .  Packy was nice in his words and encouraging on the pitch.  He was a famous hurler and popular with the grown-ups.  There was no match between his words, his hands and his thing.  He got cross if you moved or didn’t do what his hands showed you.  He got mean and scary.  Who would believe a small boy if he tried to describe those things?  He had tried to talk about it once with his mother when he was fifteen.

‘Ah, Packy’d never do anything like that.  Sure you never saw him doing anything out of the way now, did you?’

Just 47% of the anonymous responders who disclosed being victims of sexual violence to researchers by telephone had never told anyone before.  That was low.  He would have expected 90% to have kept their secret safe.

Fintan finishes his coffee and throws his uneaten sandwich to a bunch of seagulls.  The largest gull, the size of a cat, beats away the others and rips the sandwich apart, shaking its head from side to side, spilling ham, coleslaw and beetroot all over the limestone pier.

‘Son. You have to go to other people’s funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours’.

When I was twelve, I came home from school and said that I hated my teacher. He let the newspaper slacken in his hands and his severe, red face came into view.

‘Boy. If you’ve got nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all.’  And then he disappeared behind his newspaper.

I was eighteen when he finally died. Rather than lie, I gave no eulogy at all.

Outside my bedroom window a storm had found the island. Every day the sea looked more ragged and chased us further into the Atlantic. Angry waves threw themselves onto the cliffs to frighten seagulls and fishermen. No skipper could make the crossing during the storm so food was rationed and no priest came from the mainland for over a week.

He used to make me go to mass with him when I was young. We never missed a Sunday. I’d waddle up the hill in my red wellies, taking three steps to match his colossal stride. During mass I kneeled, stood and blessed myself whenever he did. I was always praying for mass to end so we could go to Concannon’s shop for the rashers and sausages. The shop wasn’t far from the church and sat at the top of the hill where the road crested the foot of Dún Chonchúr. Mick Concannon was a tall man with a tobacco yellow smile and a maroon jumper that he wore every day. He sold small amounts of everything in winter, and in the summer, he’d sell hot chips from a hatch on the side of his shop. He used to sneak me sweets when my father’s back was turned but after a while I had to stop taking them.

On the first morning of the storm, Mick’s face appeared in my front door window; a puzzled landscape of cracks and fine furrows. I was in the kitchen frying an egg. When I opened the door he asked for ‘The Sergeant’. Usually, he would be up already. I gave three loud bangs on his door and poured Mick a cup of tea while we waited for him to surface. Mick said the winds had knocked down the telephone lines and he needed to use my father’s radio to check if the ferry was coming from the mainland. He had nothing to say after that and just stared blankly into his teacup. I went to my father’s bedroom door again and gave another three loud knocks. I shouted ‘Sergeant’ but got no reply. Gravity hummed over the silence.

When I entered the room, my father was sitting up in bed beside a spent bottle of whiskey. His head was wilted towards his right shoulder and the drawn curtains. His black shoes and Sergeant’s jacket were on the floor by the bed but he was still wearing his shirt, trousers and socks. ‘Da?’ I said, still holding onto the door handle. It looked like my father but stripped of his explosive vitality. It reminded me of the dummies I put in my bed when I practiced running away to the cliffs. I stepped into the room and came closer to his bed.

‘Da?’

There was no answer. His skin was green and either his face had shrunk or his nose had gotten bigger. It looked like a beak. I touched his shoulder. He was cold and his eyes were closed to small dark slivers. He probably died in his sleep without even noticing. His skin was pulled tight across his forehead, and at one corner of his mouth, flakes of dried spit gathered under his moustache and looked like dandruff. There was no breath. Mick was standing at the doorway looking in.

‘It’s really him’, I heard myself say.

The day after he died I cleaned him up as best I could and laid him out on his bed. I dressed him in his Sergeant’s uniform and shined his shoes. I put Brylcreem in his hair and combed it straight back into a neat black sheen just the way he kept it. I shaved his face and trimmed his moustache. I cleaned under his fingernails, interlocked his grey hands on the drumlin of his stomach and placed his Garda cap on the bedside locker. I used to try it on when I was a child; the impossible size of it brought the rim over my eyes. I arrested my Bosco doll for every crime I knew of and locked him up in a cardboard box jail with ‘midnight blue’ crayon bars. But my father needed his cap for work and after a while I was forbidden from playing with it anymore.

Duty-bound sympathisers trailed in and out of the house leaving a crime scene of biscuit crumbs and half-drank cups of tea behind them. They assured me that they were sorry for my loss and I acknowledged them with a trained nod.

I proposed a gathering in the pub. Most of the regulars were there but a few were conspicuous in their absence and I made a note of their names in a flip notebook I had started carrying around in my breast pocket. We were flanked on all sides by another unruly evening, poorly made for travelling home, so the fire was lit and we sat there in a loose bunch telling stories about my father.

Mick Concannon invented flattering lies about him for my sake, and as the night ambled on and the drink got the better of my reason, I could have convinced myself that there was a kinder version of my father whom I had never met – but I didn’t. As far as I knew nobody had ever liked him. His unswayable enthusiasm for brutalising every man, woman and child in the parish with the fine print of the law, was matched only by his passion for whiskey. On the island, he was so unanimously detested that he became the standard by which other surly people were measured; the zenith of human callousness. To hear them talk about him I may as well have been at the wrong wake, so rather than listen to stories of some other son’s father, I gulped the rest of my pint and hit the bar.

Tom had tended O’Flaherty’s Bar for as long as I could remember. He was the authority on the world, the island, and everybody on it. He had big forearms that he crossed whenever he was making a point or when he had no pint to pull. What he didn’t know probably never happened at all.

He put his hand out. His palm was red and meaty, like being handed a raw steak.

‘Sorry for your loss Jimmy.’ The ’s’ sounds struggled through his mouth and whistled on their way through a gap in his front teeth.

‘Thanks Tom.’  My hand was lost in his but I returned as hearty a handshake as I could.  My father’s barstool pontifications still caromed about my head like pennies in a washing machine.

‘The measure of a man is in his handshake.’  I handed Tom’s big paw back to him and asked for a Guinness.

My father spent his final years in the pub; what he referred to as “headquarters”. Over the past few months Tom had thrown him out of the pub as many times as he had opened it. I used to hear him stumble up to the house terrorising the night with drunken accusations, and once, at the peak of his drunkenness, I heard him crying about Mum.

The day she passed away, he was in the armchair waiting for his dinner. There were three pots on the stove and my mother moved ceaselessly about the kitchen, drawing trails of steam in her wake. When she fell, she brought two full pots down on top of her. Steam rising from her body was the only thing that moved in the room. My mother always looked like she knew what she was doing. Even when she lay on the ground littered by parboiled potatoes and carrots, I expected her to sit up at any moment with a sound reason for making such a mess on the kitchen floor.

I left Tom fixing my drink and went to the toilet. When I came back there was a generous whiskey beside my pint. Tom poured one for himself and raised his glass towards me,

‘May God give peace to Sergeant Bernard.’

I clinked his glass and took a nip of whiskey. ‘Amen.’

A smooth, warm glow untied the knot in my stomach, and wisps of turf smoke pooled in my throat. It was a peat-smoked, twelve year old Scotch; nothing like the poteen I stole from my father.

‘I need a favour Tom.’

Tom put down his glass and crossed his arms.

‘I need help with the burial tomorrow.’

Tom had the same expression on his face that he gets when he’s stuck on the crossword.

‘Sure there’ll be no ferry tomorrow with these winds.’

‘Ah I can’t wait for the priest, Tom.’

‘Well you can’t bury the man without the benefit of clergy either.’  His voice took the tone he kept for drunkards to be thrown out.

‘I can’t wait Tom!’  I had said it louder then I intended and my eyes were brimming with water. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice before continuing.

‘Look, with this storm forecast for the rest of the week, he’ll be half rotten before I get a chance to bury him with a priest.  I can smell him already, you know.’

Tom said nothing for a while but he mimed hesitation.

‘I understand,’ he said finally, nodding and looking away to pour me another pint even though I hadn’t ordered it.

‘I know’, I said. ‘I just want him out of the house.’

Tom arrived early the following morning. I was still struggling with my hangover as I opened the door. He was duffled-up like an Eskimo and was kicking at the tufts of grass growing on my doorstep. His pony waited behind him in the rain and there were pickaxes and shovels on the cart. He stepped inside and brought a gust of wind with him.

I nodded and hugged my chest against the seeping chill. Half-heartedly, I offered him a cup of tea. He held up a flask and shook it, so I showed him to where the empty coffin was leaning in the corner of the kitchen, before going to my room to put more layers on. When I returned, Tom was in my father’s room and had laid the coffin beside the bed. He clasped his hands together, and with his eyebrows arched he looked at me and said,

‘Right?’

‘Right’, I said.

Tom grabbed him under the arms and I stood with one leg on either side of the coffin and grabbed my father by his ankles. He was heavier than I expected and I felt cold coming through the fabric of his navy slacks. Tom heaved him up and I slung his legs out of the bed and lowered them into the coffin. When I released him, his feet rolled from side to side on the heel of his black shiny shoes and for a second, he was dancing in his coffin. I had never seen him dance. Tom covered him with the lid and secured it with brass screws, taking him out the back door, feet first.

I made sure all the windows and doors were locked before we left and Tom strapped the coffin and tools down with heavy ropes tied in bowline knots. The pony was reluctant to set off into the strong wind and Tom had to convince him with a willow rod. The cemetery was on the far side; six miles made arduous by the importunate storm and the unreasonable shape of the island.

We climbed the hill towards Dún Chonchúr and down the other side passing the empty church (where Tom blessed himself), the dormant pub, and the houses with flickering amber windowpanes. It was hard to see past the downpour and the road stretched forward for only a few metres before being swallowed up by sweeping sheets of rain. The wind made it hard to hear, or talk, or catch a clean breath, so Tom had to shout slowly to make conversation.

‘We’ll have to send to the mainland for our Guards as well as our priests now. That’s mainland politicians for you. They never did any good for us.’

I nodded and said that he was right.

Tom grumbled his throat clear and continued, ‘For all of his faults, your father was the most committed policeman we ever had here.’

Tom was a born diplomat. I said he’d be a hard man to replace, but I don’t think I said it loud enough for Tom to hear over the wind.

The roads took us past the ruins of the island’s other pagan fort, Dún Fearbhe, poking its head out of billowing clouds. I used to think Zeus lived up there. Two weeks ago, I took poteen from my father’s room using an empty jam jar and went to the remote Dún where I was less likely to be caught. The poteen tasted like fire, but I got enough of it into me to know what all the fuss was about. I climbed the wide walls and haunted the fort’s dead Gods. I roared back at the sea and at the mainlanders who thought they were better than us. Towards the end of the afternoon, I threw rocks at the cows below until they all ran away, and then at the walls until my throwing arm got tired. The dark was hurrying in, so I began a slow pace home and tried to play the part of a sober young man, out for a walk. I did well hailing my neighbours in their fields along the way, with an easy smile and a tip of my cap, careful not to be too enthusiastic or uneven.

As I came through the front door, my act was undone when I stumbled on an upturned corner of the rug. My father was sitting in his armchair near the fire.

‘Well?  What the Hell is the matter with you?’  His voice was rasping like there was phlegm boiling at the back of his throat.

I was promised a hiding if he ever caught me drinking so I said, ‘nothing,’ and turned to leave the kitchen but bumped into the table and knocked a knife onto the floor. As I stooped to pick it up, my father rose from his seat in a determined stride towards me. I heard him sniffing the air for clues as I struggled to regain an elusive balance. My father’s face was gathering closer behind a mist of stars. I thought I was going to pass out when the white noise finally lifted; everything in the world had stopped dead in its tracks. We were standing toe to toe and there was a foreign expression of fear on his face. I followed his eyes down to the knife tip that was touching the breast pocket of his uniform. We stared each other down over a crushing silence until he slapped my hand and the knife splashed silver on the floor like a gasping fish.

That was Friday evening and my face was only beginning to swell. He left me with one empty bucket and one filled with water, and locked the cell door behind him. On Monday my bruises were yellow and he released me. Neither of us had said a word to each other since.

When the pier came into sight, the small amount of shelter offered by the stone walls was gone and our progress was met by the full force of the driving rain. I pulled my winter coat tight about my neck and we turned left where the hill tapered to meet the pier. The turn skirted the fringe of the island for another half mile before it arrived at the cemetery and faded into sand. We clung tight enough to the cliffs to taste salt from the waves.

The cemetery looked directly out to sea, there was a road to the pier on the left, a path to the faerie hill on the right, and a plane of limestone crags stretched out behind it. Tom said that most cemeteries are at crossroads to make it hard for the dead to find their way home. This one wasn’t.

The cemetery gate was rusted and brittle. At my mother’s burial I tried to grab hold of my father’s hand. He jerked it away and said that was my mother’s job. ‘She’s dead’, he said, and stepped through the gate ahead of me.

As the priest read the prayers and they put her in the ground, my father’s emotions were tightly concealed behind his moustache. I was crying so hard nobody could hear the priest, so Maire Concannon came over and patted my back like a baby.  After the funeral, my father and I stayed behind while all the others filtered out of the graveyard. When the last mourner had left, he looked down at me and said,

‘You shamed your mother today with that performance. Shamed us all, in front of the whole village.’ Then he stooped down to my eye level and said with as much malice as he could summon; ‘Crying is for girls and criminals. So, which did I raise?’ I looked at the ground, but knew that not to give him an answer was to invite punishment. ‘A criminal’ I said.

He snorted as he threw his head back. ‘I’m going to O’Flaherty’s. You go home.’

I returned to the graveside sucking the air silently through my pale face. He stopped at the gates and shouted back, ‘I’ll make a man out of you yet.’

For sometime afterwards I tried to beat my father at forcing these drawn-out silences. His were always larger and louder than mine. He was the size of a man whose silence rippled like a quiet, bubbling threat.

We dug his plot next to my mother’s. The rain had made the soil heavy and my hand’s broken blisters stung with every blow of the shovel. Apart from its weight, the soil seemed willing and we met few stones large enough to slow our progress. We set the coffin on two planks over the grave and lowered it using the ropes we’d used to tie up the cart. When it was done, Tom turned away to give me a moment alone but he returned to help once he heard the first shovel load land on the coffin lid. We were thorough in our work and the hole filled quickly. I said a prayer for my mother before I left.

As is customary with burials, we took separate paths and avoided our usual routes home. I shook Tom’s hand and told him I’d see him in the pub later on. He took the pier road because it was the only one able for the pony and cart. I walked the other way, past the faerie hill and down along the foot of the island where the terns make nests behind the sand dunes and attack you if you get too close. I looked over my shoulder as I climbed walls and jumped fences, but saw nothing behind me except the rain that was starting to ease.

The house was dark and hard to distinguish from the line of the night as I approached it. On my way from the gate to the front door an overgrown fuchsia clawed my sleeve. I’d have to do something about the garden now that it was mine. When I got inside, I turned on all the lights, lit the fire and put the kettle on. My jumper splashed like a wet mop when I dropped it to the floor. My father had plenty of smart clothes that hadn’t fit him in years, so I went into his bedroom and opened his wardrobe. His first Sergeant’s uniform was hanging inside a plastic cover. The one that hadn’t been stretched by his belly. It was crisp and dark blue, and when I put it on it fit just fine. I closed the wardrobe door to look at myself in the mirror. His Garda cap was still on top of the bedside locker. It wasn’t his hat anymore. There was also a bottle of whiskey, and that was mine now too.

I was feeling a distinctive brand of terrible the following morning. Nausea and remorse were trying to outbid one another for my attention. The scalding racket from my own delicate movements was already too much for my nerves, but the rapping at the front door was scoring wounding channels in my head. When I pulled the door open, the sun was blinding and there was a priest standing on the step. He looked confused.

‘Could I speak to the master of the house…Sergeant? I understand there’s been a death.’

I have sought recourse in the Good Book, but have found no consolation. It has not absolved me of this which I must do, but instead left me with the foul confirmation of this course I must navigate. I struck out at my wife, when she would not cease the horrible keening and wailing of which these ragged natives are so fond. I hear her still, sobbing in her quarters, and I feel the loops of guilt tighten themselves around my weak heart. Hasty to anger I have always been- I was famed for it in my youth, and my rage has come back to haunt me.

I must do it.

I cannot.

I must- I am King Arthur. I never cared a fig for those romances but now I see their point. Would that I had his decisiveness, or the wisdom of King Solomon! But I have only myself, here in this accursed grey outpost lashed by the wind and rain.

And in his defence, what had he to say?

“She was a buxom lass, just off the boat. I knew not of her provenance or of her ties. I knew simply the burning look she gave me that said ‘You may have me tonight’. I knew it. I knew it from the toss of her jet-black locks, I knew it from the fire in my loins and I knew it from the way she let me glimpse the smooth, sallow sheen of her thigh as she passed me by. Oh, she wanted me and well did I know… and you are hardly one to talk! The beds of all the wenches in this castle have been warmer than my mother’s for more nights than I care to remember. Yes, I know what goes on under this roof too, and I’ll wager that you and I have been thrusting in some of the same places…”

And I struck him. He came for me, and it would have been the shallow rocky grave for one of us if my constable had not pulled us apart. Perhaps it would have been me, for he is young and quick and I am old and tired. I think I wish it had gone that way and I wouldn’t have to see this infanticide through.

They came to the house, at least a dozen of them, heavily armed and seeking redress. Oh, it would have been no matter to cut them down in the street, but where would that leave this fledgling town? Or this family’s noble reputation?

‘Everfaithful!’ That is us.

But ever faithful to whom? To the ties of blood? To the ties of duty? To Justice, that blind bitch who sees everything? More than all of this, I think, is faithfulness to my own pride- the fear of becoming a hypocrite, the fear of failing to live up to a code which I set myself.

“Where is he?” they demanded.

“Who?” I asked innocently before the horrific dawn of reality came upon me.

They told me what had happened, or at the least their version of it, which I am loath to believe readier than his. He was not in the house.

I had raised the guard and we found him easy enough, without a care in the world, drinking the early hours of the morning away in a peasant’s shack, his arm groping the naked breast of some peasant girl. His stupor was such that he made no attempt to escape, or to challenge the accusations. He merely shrugged and smiled at me, as if to say ‘touché’. It was dawn as we marched him back to the castle, and the peasants were already out on the roads, wandering to and from one another’s meagre holdings to work for a daily meal of oats or black bread. In their inscrutable faces I thought I read a shadow of satisfaction. Perhaps it was hunger, or the deference they showed as they tugged their forelocks. Perhaps it was my own tormented mind, but I felt them laughing at me, as though they knew. They know far more than they show, these peasants, and I sense they are just waiting for me to show weakness. Then they will pounce like starving dogs and break down all that which I have made of this estate my father was thrown as an afterthought. They have seen me hang their fathers, brothers and even womenfolk for the thievery, lawlessness and sedition that is endemic in this place.

And that is why I must be strong and see this thing through.

“I entertained the Don, as you commanded me, and I showed him the utmost courtesy. I even directed the musicians to play some of his foreign music, as best as they could. I executed your commands to the very word, and I found him to be most receptive to the new tariffs and trading agreements you had instructed me to negotiate with him. Once that tiresome business was done, I took to showing those mariners some Norman hospitality. I drank fine port and sherry with some of his crewmen. I sang with them and wagered with them, allowing them to win enough to keep dignity. I did all of this in an ambassadorial capacity, to further your ambitions, to strengthen your alliances, to fill your coffers with coin. And after all this, was it so bold of me to taste of the fruits of that Mediterranean land.”

He did not understand, he still does not understand, that this is not a world where you can do as you wish, that this is a world where you do as you must. Duty. Noblesse oblige.

“She was willing, a game filly indeed. You expect me to satisfy myself with the horse-faced daughters of the other families? I would rather throw myself upon the peasant wenches of the O’Connors or the O’Flahertys! They, at least, know how to please a man. They have not been tainted with the notions of courtliness or the cold bed of an arranged match. Look at your own marriage, father!”

I know what it has produced, this marriage of convenience. But he lives in a world fed by stories of knights and romance, the bawdy tavern songs of sailors and the whirling, frenzied dancing of the natives. A world of submission to desire. Yet this is not the world for us. More is expected of us.

The Don was implacable. I offered him damages for the loss of his cousin. I offered him anything that was in my power to give and more besides, but Don Colón refused everything. He would settle for nothing less than the ultimate penalty or he threatened to sever relations completely and use another port. All my work would be in vain, all my careful negotiations and plentiful bribes. His trade would make this a city, would raise it from a settlement of scavenging dogs to a place of importance here on the edge of the world. Blood is thicker than water, I have heard it said, but it is the ties of the water that keep this port alive. Without it, and without my control of it, then this colony is nothing.

Today, I cannot be a father. Today, I must be the blind hand of justice, and if the Bacchae tear me to pieces for it, then this is the price I will pay. If only I could give my own life for his- my life that is old, my limbs knotted up from the effort of building all this for him.

“I laid that dusky Iberian jewel down in the hay-barn. Yes, father’ (he spat the word) I am telling you what happened but please allow me to savour this conquest as though it were my last. It may be my last?”

For a moment, I saw a scared young man, ill-versed in the harsh ways of the world, pleading with his father to extricate him from some tangle he was in. And then it was gone.

“It may be that her moans drew attention to the barn or that someone had seen us leave- I do not know, but I was just about to… well, you know what happens… when I saw a man enter the barn, babbling intelligibly in that rapid tongue. I could understand little, but between my poor Latin and the demeanour of the man I caught the sense of it. And, the sword he brandished left little room for misunderstanding. He meant to kill me, father. I do not know why. Perhaps he was enamoured of the girl. Perhaps she was a sister, a cousin, I do not know. Yet I should think it was obvious that I had not forced myself upon her. Perhaps these Spaniards do not understand their women’s noises...”

This had aggravated Don Colón and his men, and they would have had him there and then if they were not strangers at my mercy. I roared at them, feeling some angry vigour of youth returning.

“There are but two dispensers of justice in this town! God is one, and I am the other. You will await my decision, sirs!”

“He came at me, shouting threats and curses. I reached for my jerkin and unsheathed my dagger, as I unsheathed myself from her. I do not recollect exactly what happened next, but I know that what I did, I did in defence of myself, perhaps even in her defence, for the man was enraged. I had no choice! I had no choice, father! Would you rather it was me lying dead in that barn? Perhaps you would…”

I allowed the Spaniards to present their case and their witnesses. They would not allow the girl to speak as they claimed she was feverish and could not leave their caravel. No other had seen the incident, only my son holding a bloodied dagger over the fallen body of their compatriot.

I sat the night thinking. They demanded justice, and swiftly, for they had to sail with the favourable winds or not at all. How I wished I could send men to their ships to murder every one of them and sink this matter beneath the water for ever. But I could not. For so many reasons, I could not.

It is my castle. It is not so large as the castles of the Ormonds, nor so elegant as those of the FitzGilberts, nor so sturdy as those of the Earls of the South. But it is mine, and the seat of my power. My land is not so fertile as theirs, and my subjects are neither as productive nor as fertile as theirs. Mine is a different territory, and the sea brings this place closer to Spain and Barbary than to the Pale. Here, I am the law. I look around the room, at the tapestries and the hunting trophies, at the crudely made furniture and the imported glassware, at the wines and spices form Spain, at the flax and leather that we trade with them. I look at the illuminated books, some of them centuries old and relics of a more civilised time on this island. I look at the ledgers and the census books, a feeble attempt to count the indolent wealth and population of an unknowable people in constant flux. I look at the legacy of my life’s work, and I feel nothing. I feel I have been simply a shell, a slave acting upon some higher command. I look at the statue of the Lord Jesus and I feel his disappointment. Yet I merely do what Abraham would have done. There is no reprieve for me, no voice of approbation from above. I look at my wife and she will not stare me in the eye.

I look everywhere but I cannot look out the window, where an audience of Spaniards and Irish watch my son soil himself as he slowly chokes to death at the end of a rope that I knotted for him.

Paul had called for him at tea time, when Vinnie was sitting with his mother in the back room, not saying much. He’d been listening to the wind in the chimney and thought it funny that the wind sounded different in each ear. He hadn’t noticed that before. His mother was smoking and the deep lines in her face seemed to hold within them the hurts and disappointments of forty years of living.

‘Ma, we’re going for a game of snooker – see you later.’

When they were gone, the wind made her think of Vinnie as a boy when he called her out the back to see the heap he had gathered under the tree – the shining, red-tan conkers, some of them split open and showing their soft-white chestnut beds. It seemed a long time ago now, a time before her son became restless and edgy.

They walk to the Bull’s Wall down at Crescent Quay. Vinnie is taller than his friend but he has a way of appearing smaller than anybody he’s with. It’s the way his shoulders curve downwards; the uncomfortable gait of his body. Vinnie makes sure they skirt the church. Vinnie hasn’t passed the building in seven years, seven years this October. The streets are crowded with toffs – the opera ones.

‘Jaysus, did you hear about yer man – the one who’s givin’ them the millions?’ Paul said.

‘What are ya on about?’

‘The millionaire guy – he’s giving the opera crowd two million for the new opera place. What planet are ya on?’

They’re outside the Theatre Royal on High Street. There’s a gigantic picture of the new opera building on the hoarding, showing a skyline and a huge green fly-tower soaring way above the church spire.

‘We might get a job up there’, Paul says, prodding Vinnie and grinning. The two work as roofers with a local contractor.

‘Ya big eejit. That’s a copper roof.’

They head for their usual haunt, Danny’s Pub on Main Street, for the craic of watching the opera toffs head out for the night dressed to kill.

Danny’s is a long, narrow, corner pub with photos of Wexford hurling teams covering the walls of the low-ceiling room. Vinnie’s favourite picture is the one of Liam Griffin punching the air the year of the county’s last All Ireland glory. The two sit close to the window. They have to lift their heads to look up on to the street.

‘Vin, there he is – yer man – in the kilt!’ They watch out for him each year.

The crowds are heading for High Street with glossy programmes in their fists. Vinnie is waiting for a woman in high heels to trip; they always did.

By the second pint he’s starting to relax. It feels a bit like when he had a bad sore throat and took antibiotics – soothing like.

‘Vin, I think there’s comedy at the Talbot – a late night gig – will we give it a go. It could be craic. I’ll get the paper and have a look. What do ya think?’

That’s when he nipped out to get the Wexford People.

Now Vinnie is looking down at the headlines: Unbelievable – Shocking Truth of Ferns Enquiry.

A good-looking cleric is looking straight up at him. There are four of them on the front page. But Vinnie only sees one – the smiling face under dark thick hair; a face you’d trust. He hasn’t laid eyes on him in seven years.

Paul is talking to a girl in a red top with her nipples pressing through the tight cloth. The beer is seeping through the newspaper. As Vinnie stares, the beer seeps over the photo, turning the man’s face into a soggy yellow mess.

Vinnie keeps watching the face. He’s thinking of the green tower soaring high over the Church spire. He’s thinking that he’ll walk home past the church to-night. He’s thinking it, but he knows he won’t.

Hoppy went to the shop every morning for twenty Carrolls, a bag of Emerald sweets and The Irish Independent that was kept for Arthur’s house. Hoppy liked to collect the paper before the staff got it so he could check the headlines. Where The Irish Times would lead with ‘Revenue Commissioners to investigate politicians funding’, The Irish Independent could be relied on to come up with something catchier: ‘Mystery leak reveals Tánaiste’s finances.’

As Hoppy didn’t read anything but the headlines, his world view was slightly askew. He read the banner type in the knowledge that all the stories were centred on himself. He believed in everything. Catholicism, Buddhism, Horoscopes and Chaos theory: all were valid in his world view. He used to read books that suggested a butterfly beating its wings in New Hampshire could initiate a typhoon in China. These theories were all attractive and Hoppy picked from them at will, he was the ultimate á-la-carte practitioner. The fact that a lot of his beliefs contradicted each other did not bother him. The theories co-existed in his mind like parallel lines. He believed in reincarnation, the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, and he believed in pretty much everything he heard on the radio. He was distrustful of television because he was sure it broadcast messages designed to disturb people like him.

He sometimes walked into the TV room across from the nurses’ station where Arthur worked and sat watching the screen with his Walkman turned up loud, just to prove he could. He never stayed long. The rolling news showed famine and pestilence, war and genocide while he existed in his musical bubble. Sometimes the radio played songs like ‘I’m a Believer’ by the Monkees. He hated the jangling guitars and honeyed vocals but the chorus made sense to him. Everyone nowadays was cynically rejecting organised religion and civic engagement while Hoppy embraced every belief he could cram into his disturbed but broad mind.

Hoppy had read a lot as he grew up; he had preferred the world of books to that of reality. As the messages came to him the lines separating the two worlds started to blur. When his mother died, Hoppy threw the television in the back garden and survived on a diet of beans and toast and the Marion Finnucane Show. This continued until a social worker came and told him he would be better off moving into the houses in the park.

Arthur liked his work; he managed the houses for the Health Board and had been doing the job for 10 years. He saw all sorts of clients come in but he didn’t like the look of McHugh. Arthur’s clients usually functioned well and he minded their money for them. They could go out for a pint or go shopping whenever it suited them. In his experience the houses functioned like a reality TV show; all the residents had their own agenda and this could lead to conflicts. McHugh was affable enough when he came in. His dark eyes darted from side to side as he gave his details. On instinct Arthur placed him in a room with three tough men who barely acknowledged his arrival. Arthur was off that night but heard that McHugh had tried to start with one of the men in his room. He had been put down and he stayed down. Arthur nodded the next morning when he heard the reports; these things had a habit of levelling themselves out.

Hoppy lived in one of the small houses and was having difficulty isolating himself from the world. One day he went to Arthur and asked for 100 Euro of his allowance. Hoppy didn’t go to the pub and cigarettes were his main expense so the manager handed him the money without question. Hoppy got the bus into town and went into an electronics shop on the quays. The shop assistant wore a cheap polyester suit and a loud tie. He looked Hoppy up and down, taking in the unfashionable jumper and shoes.

“Can I help you there?”

“I want to buy a pair of headphones.”

“Well they start at €8.99 for the in-the-ear ones.”

“No, I want ones that block out the noise like the DJs have. To block out the…ye know.”

“Background noise. We have Sennheiser Pro headphones but they are a bit dearer.”

Hoppy asked the question with his eyes. How much?

“€99.50″

“Can I try them out?”

The shop assistant was surprised that Hoppy would even consider the price and shrugged as he picked out a demo model. After all, it was more commission for him if the strange little man made a purchase. Hoppy gave him a disc and he placed it in a player. Before he had a chance to plug in the headphones the shop was filled with the sounds of Chumbawumba singing that “I get knocked down and I get up again”. The assistant plugged in the correct lead and Hoppy put on the headphones. He was transfixed as people walked around him in the shop without a sound. He paid for the oversized headphones and walked all the way back to the houses marvelling at them. That was before McHugh found him.

McHugh had spent some time homeless but was too belligerent to be an effective beggar. He soon came up with an alternative strategy. He would call around on the younger lads on the street and take from them. He would get a few fags and some money to buy cans in the Spar shop. He operated by isolating one beggar at a time, looking for addicts. He would lean in over their huddled figures.

“Have you seen the gear man?”

“No, he comes around at eleven.”

“Are you buying off him?”

“No, I told you I’m skint.”

“You are a dirty little junkie, you will be buying. Give it to me or I’ll slit you wide open.”

The beggar would protest but, paralysed with fear, would hand over the balled-up notes and Euro coins. McHugh usually threw the coppers in the river. It meant nothing to him but it broke the beggars; from then on he owned them. He strutted around town collecting from the homeless and drinking the proceeds by the canal or in the park. It wasn’t a bad life but he was barred from his home, and as the weather became colder he needed to find a new gaf.

He went to the social and got himself assessed. The psychologist reported that he was a sociopath and as such was entitled to housing. He worked his way through a number of Health Board buildings until he came to Arthur’s. He didn’t like the look that Arthur gave him the first day, as if he could see through him. He was put in a room with three violent bastards. The first night he was knocked to the floor by a big docker from the inner city and he decided to bide his time for a while. He drank his allowance in a pub near the train station but it was never enough. He needed to cultivate an additional source of income and he was smart enough to know he couldn’t do it under Arthur’s nose.

The new headphones gave Hoppy total immunity from the noise of the world. He glanced through the headlines in the tabloids outside the newsagents:

“Man slain by wolf boy.” No problem.

“Posh Totty beds Footballer.” Fine.

“Police seek source of racial slur leak.” This one made him a little uncomfortable but he was safe in his musical cocoon. The shopkeeper placed the Carrolls and Emeralds sweets on the counter.

“Howiya Hoppy, how are you today?”

Hoppy nodded in time to the music and gave him a thumbs up as he handed over the money. He picked up The Independent with ‘St. Ita’s’ written over the masthead and headed back towards the houses. A helicopter flew overhead but Hoppy was miles away. He headed for Arthur’s building and dropped off the newspaper at the nurse’s station. He never saw McHugh approach from behind and never heard his footsteps in the gravel. The first thing he felt was the headphones being ripped off his ears as a powerful figure pinned him against the brick wall.

“Fags!” hissed McHugh as he rummaged in Hoppy’s jacket. He took the cigarettes and placed his finger to his lips as Hoppy slid down the wall. Hoppy limped to his room and spent the day curled up under the blankets. The ruined stereo lay on the ground beside the bed and every time a door opened he flinched. McHugh was waiting for him each day and Hoppy tried to buy him off with extra cigarettes but McHugh still took everything he had.

Hoppy became so paralysed that he even endured the nicotine withdrawal pangs to try and avoid going outside. For that he received a beating that put him in hospital for a few days. Arthur visited him and tried to get him to tell the story.

“You can tell me, we can deal with…this.”

Hoppy just stared at his feet in the bed.

“It is noisy here, I can’t stand the racket of all those people chattering,” he said, indicating the near-deserted ward. Arthur went out and bought him a Walkman from his own money as Hoppy had been eating into his allowance. He told himself that he should have spotted it earlier. Hoppy’s injuries were not serious, cracked ribs and a broken nose, but he refused to go back to the unit.

Arthur went back to work and quizzed the nurses and the more reliable clients. One patient nervously mentioned McHugh and a junior nurse confirmed his suspicions. Arthur called a meeting which McHugh refused to attend. Arthur was careful to go through the correct procedures; a lifetime filling forms had taught him that. McHugh was thrown out of the building. He showed up around the gates for a couple of days but security moved him on.

After much coaxing Hoppy came back to his room. The hardened docker accompanied him to the shop each day until his confidence returned and one day he went to town on the bus. The summer passed and life got back to normal in the unit.

One day a woman came to see Arthur. She said she was McHugh’s sister. He had been found dead in the park with an empty whiskey bottle beside him. She said she understood why Arthur had kicked him out and they could only guess how her brother had died. The guards were not pushing for a post-mortem in this case. It looked like he had drank himself to death. The next day Arthur and two nurses were to represent the unit at the funeral. On a whim, Arthur told Hoppy the news. Hoppy just nodded. Then he spoke.

“I want to go to the funeral.”

“Are you sure?”

Hoppy nodded again. He changed into his Sunday best and sat in the back of Arthur’s car. This was the first time he had left the grounds without music soothing him. Arthur turned the radio up for him and he stared out the window all the way to the church. There was only the sister, a social worker and the four men from the unit watching the priest perform the ceremony. They watched the coffin being laid in the ground; there were no tears. There was no meal afterwards, no talk of the past or the dead man, just the marking of an event.

The director of the facility was not convinced that Hoppy should have attended the service. Something to do with admitting liability. He often talked about things like that. Arthur reckoned the director spent even more time filling bigger forms than he did himself. Arthur didn’t like forms much; he preferred talking to people. Anyway, he was happy that he had made the right decision. Hoppy walked a little taller afterwards; not much, but even a slight improvement was considered a victory. Arthur went back to filling out rosters and attending union meetings. This was his little territory in between the trees and he was happy to stay here. He liked most of his charges, he supposed he just wanted to see them as happy as possible.